Brands
were originally developed as labels of ownership:
name, term, design, symbol. However, today it
is what they do for people that matters much more,
how they reflect and engage them, how they define
their aspiration and enable them to do more. Powerful
brands can drive success in competitive and financial
markets, and indeed become the organisation’s
most valuable assets.

A
great brand is one you want to live your life
by, one you trust and hang on to while everything
around you is changing, one that articulates the
type of person you are or want to be, one that
enables you to do what you couldn’t otherwise
achieve. Brand type is divided into four categories.

* ‘Being’ brands: emotionally confirms
you are somebody
* ‘Becoming’ brands: aspirationally
defines what you want to be
* ‘Doing’ brands: functionally enables
you to do something
* ‘Belonging’ brands: connects you
with other people like you

Etymology

Brand,
along with many modern-language lexemes such as
English burn and brandy, German brennen, and those
in many European languages based on the root therm-,
are all ultimately related to the ideas of warmth,
heat, burning, etc., and descend from an Indo-European
root that has been reconstructed as /gwher/.

In
the Old English language, the noun brond is first
attested from the epic poem Beowulf (circa 1000)
meaning "destruction by fire."

Throughout
the ages, brand had been used in figurative and
transferred senses to mean "a person delivered
from imminent danger," "the torches
of Cupid and the Furies," and "Jove's
or God's or Phoebus' brand."

Brand
had also been figuratively applied since the late
16th century to criminalize people (as in disgrace,
a stigma, or mark of infamy) and in the sense
of firebrand since the 17th century.

The
idea of marking things, people, or animals by
burning identifying marks onto them is clearly
an ancient one.

While
described as a physical impression of ownership
on livestock by way of hot-iron branding since
the mid-17th century, modern senses of brand as
used in business began to arise in the early 19th
century when the term was figuratively extended
to trademarks and logos. During this time, brands
were imprinted on casks of wine, timber, and other
goods except textile fabrics.

During
the 19th century in primarily the United States,
hot irons used for marking livestock and cauterizing
wounds were called brands, and later cattle and
other livestock were also referred to as brands.
A brand blotter was a thief who stole, and removed
marks of ownership from, cattle.

Since
the early 17th century in biology, a brand had
been called "a species of blight in plants,
causing the leaves and young shoots to look [burnt]."
The word was also used to refer to swords and
other blades from the 11th to 19th centuries.

History

In
the field of marketing, brands originated in the
nineteenth century with the advent of packaged
goods. According to Unilever records, Pears Soap
was the world's first registered commercial brand.
Industrialization moved the production of household
items, such as soap, from local communities to
centralized factories. When shipping their items,
the factories would brand their logotype insignia
on the shipping barrels. These factories, generating
mass-produced goods, needed to sell their products
to a wider range of customers, to a customer base
familiar only with local goods, and it turned
out that a generic package of soap had difficulty
competing with familiar, local products.

The
fortunes of many of that era's brands, such as
Uncle Ben's rice and Kellogg's breakfast cereal,
illustrate the problem. The packaged goods manufacturers
needed to convince buyers that they could trust
in the non-local, factory product. Campbell soup,
Coca-Cola, Juicy Fruit gum, Aunt Jemima, and Quaker
Oats, were the first American products to be branded
to increase the customer's familiarity with the
products.

Around
1900, James Walter Thompson published a house
advert explaining trademark advertising, in an
early commercial description of what now is known
as 'branding'. Soon, companies adopted slogans,
mascots, and jingles that were heard on radio
and seen in early television. By the 1940s, Mildred
Pierce manufacturers recognized how customers
were developing relationships with their brands
in the social, psychological, and anthropological
senses. From that, manufacturers quickly learned
to associate other kinds of brand values, such
as youthfulness, fun, and luxury, with their products.
Thus began the practice of 'branding', wherein
the customer buys the brand rather than the product.
This trend arose in the 1980s 'brand equity mania'.
In 1988, Phillip Morris bought Kraft for six times
its paper worth. It is believed the purchase was
made because the Phillip Morris company actually
wanted the Kraft brand rather than the company
and its products.

April
2, 1993, labelled Marlboro Friday, is described
by Klein (2000) as the death day of the brand.
On that day, Phillip Morris declared a 20 per
cent price cut of Marlboro cigarettes in order
to compete with cheaper price cigarettes. At the
time, Marlboro cigarettes were notorious for their
heavy advertising campaigns, and nuanced brand
image. On that day, the prices of many branded
companies Wall street stocks fell: Heinz, Coca
Cola, Quaker Oats, PepsiCo; seemingly the
signal of the beginning 'brand blindness'(Klein
13).

Concepts

Marketers
engaged in branding seek to develop or align the
expectations behind the brand experience, creating
the impression that a brand associated with a
product or service has certain qualities or characteristics
that make it special or unique. A brand image
may be developed by attributing a "personality"
to or associating an "image" with a
product or service, whereby the personality or
image is "branded" into the consciousness
of consumers. A brand is therefore one of the
most valuable elements in an advertising theme.
The art of creating and maintaining a brand is
called brand management.

A
brand which is widely known in the marketplace
acquires brand recognition. When brand recognition
builds up to a point where a brand enjoys a critical
mass of positive sentiment in the marketplace,
it is said to have achieved brand franchise. One
goal in brand recognition is the identification
of a brand without the name of the company present.
For example, Disney
has been successful at branding with their particular
script font (originally created for Walt Disney's
"signature" logo), which it used in
the logo for go.com.

"DNA"
refers to the unique attributes, essence, purpose,
or profile of a brand and, therefore, a company.
The term is borrowed from the biological DNA,
the molecular "blueprint" or genetic
profile of an organism which determines its unique
characteristics.

The
act of associating a product or service with a
brand has become part of pop culture. Most products
have some kind of brand identity, from common
table salt to designer clothes. In non-commercial
contexts, the marketing of entities which supply
ideas or promises rather than product and services
(e.g. political parties or religious organizations)
may also be known as "branding".

Brand equity

Brand
equity measures the total value of the brand to
the brand owner, and reflects the extent of brand
franchise. The term brand name is often used interchangeably
with "brand", although it is more correctly
used to specifically denote written or spoken
linguistic elements of a brand. In this context
a "brand name" constitutes a type of
trademark, if the brand name exclusively identifies
the brand owner as the commercial source of products
or services. A brand owner may seek to protect
proprietary rights in relation to a brand name
through trademark registration.

Attitude branding

Attitude
branding is the choice to represent a feeling,
which is not necessarily connected with the product
or consumption of the product at all. Marketing
labeled as attitude branding includes that of
Apple, Nike, Safeway, Starbucks, and The Body
Shop.

Brand monopoly

In
economic terms the "brand" is a device
to create a monopoly—or at least some form
of "imperfect competition"—so
that the brand owner can obtain some of the benefits
which accrue to a monopoly, particularly those
related to decreased price competition. For example,
the Coca Cola corporation can never have a monopoly
on cola-flavored soda pop, but it can have a monopoly
on its own brand of cola-flavored soda pop. In
this context, most "branding" is established
by promotional means. There is also a legal dimension,
for it is essential that the brand names and trademarks
are protected by all means available. The monopoly
may also be extended, or even created, by patent,
copyright, trade secret (e.g. secret recipe),
and other sui generis intellectual property regimes
(e.g.: Plant Varieties Act, Design Act).

In
all these contexts, retailers' "own label"
brands can be just as powerful. The "brand",
whatever its derivation, is a very important investment
for any organization. RHM (Rank Hovis McDougall),
for example, have valued their international brands
at anything up to twenty times their annual earnings.
Often, especially in the industrial sector, it
is just the company's name which is promoted (leading
to one of the most powerful statements of "branding";
the saying, before the company's downgrading,
"No-one ever got fired for buying IBM").

Brand extension

An
existing strong brand name can be used as a vehicle
for new or modified products; for example, many
fashion and designer companies extended brands
into fragrances, shoes and accessories, home textile,
home decor, luggage, (sun-) glasses, furniture,
hotels, etc. Mars extended its brand to ice cream,
Caterpillar to shoes and watches, Michelin to
a restaurant guide, Adidas
and Puma to personal hygiene.

There
is a difference between brand extension and line
extension. When Coca-Cola launched "Diet
Coke" and "Cherry Coke" they stayed
within the originating product category: non-alcoholic
carbonated beverages. Procter & Gamble (P&G)
did likewise extending its strong lines (such
as Fairy Soap) into neighboring products (Fairy
Liquid and Fairy Automatic) within the same category,
dish washing detergents. These are examples of
line, not brand extensions.

Multiple brands

In
a market fragmented with many brands, a supplier
can choose to launch new brands apparently competing
with its own, extant strong brand (and often with
an identical product), simply to obtain a greater
share of the market that would go to minor brands.
The rationale is that having 3 out of 12 brands
in such a market will give garner a greater, overall
share than having 1 out of 10 (even if much of
the share of these new brands is taken from the
existing one). In its most extreme manifestation,
a supplier pioneering a new market which it believes
will be particularly attractive may choose immediately
to launch a second brand in competition with its
first, in order to pre-empt others entering the
market.

Individual
brand names naturally allow greater flexibility
by permitting a variety of different products,
of differing quality, to be sold without confusing
the consumer's perception of what business the
company is in or diluting higher quality products.

Once
again, Procter & Gamble is a leading exponent
of this philosophy, running as many as ten detergent
brands in the US market. This also increases the
total number of "facings" it receives
on supermarket shelves. Sara Lee, on the other
hand, uses it to keep the very different parts
of the business separate—from Sara Lee cakes
through Kiwi polishes to L'Eggs pantyhose. In
the hotel business, Marriott uses the name Fairfield
Inns for its budget chain (and Ramada uses Rodeway
for its own cheaper hotels).

Cannibalization
is a particular problem of a "multibrand"
approach, in which the new brand takes business
away from an established one which the organization
also owns. This may be acceptable (indeed to be
expected) if there is a net gain overall. Alternatively,
it may be the price the organization is willing
to pay for shifting its position in the market;
the new product being one stage in this process.

With
the emergence of strong retailers, the "own
brand", the retailer's own branded product
(or service), emerged as a major factor in the
marketplace. Where the retailer has a particularly
strong identity, such as, in the UK, Marks &
Spencer in clothing, this "own brand"
may be able to compete against even the strongest
brand leaders, and may dominate those markets
which are not otherwise strongly branded. There
was a fear that such "own brands" might
displace all other brands (as they have done in
Marks & Spencer outlets), but the evidence
is that—at least in supermarkets and department
stores—consumers generally expect to see
on display something over 50 per cent (and preferably
over 60 per cent) of brands other than those of
the retailer. Indeed, even the strongest own brands
in the United Kingdom rarely achieve better than
third place in the overall market. In the US,
Target has "own" brands of "Market
Pantry" and "Archer Farms" each
with unique packaging and placement.

The
strength of the retailers has, perhaps, been seen
more in the pressure they have been able to exert
on the owners of even the strongest brands (and
in particular on the owners of the weaker third
and fourth brands). Relationship marketing has
been applied most often to meet the wishes of
such large customers (and indeed has been demanded
by them as recognition of their buying power).
Some of the more active marketers have now also
switched to 'category marketing'—in which
they take into account all the needs of a retailer
in a product category rather than more narrowly
focusing on their own brand.

At
the same time, generic (that is, effectively unbranded
goods) have also emerged. These made a positive
virtue of saving the cost of almost all marketing
activities; emphasizing the lack of advertising
and, especially, the plain packaging (which was,
however, often simply a vehicle for a different
kind of image). It would appear that the penetration
of such generic products peaked in the early 1980s,
and most consumers still seem to be looking for
the qualities that the conventional brand provides.
(Credit:
Wikipedia).